Are You “Creating” or Are You “Curating”?

We all know that when you curate something, you are organizing and presenting.  Like a museum where you might curate a specific exhibit.  You aren’t creating.

Creating:  Involves the production of “original” content from scratch.  The art of generating something new, that didn’t exist before.  Its purpose is to express new ideas, solve unique problems or fulfill some kind of gap through original work. Creating requires innovation, originality and specialized skills in some subject area.  It requires courage and is the work of an artist.  And by artist I am not just referring to sculpture or painting, etc.

Curating:  Involves selecting, organizing and presenting content that already exists.  Gathering relevant material from various sources. It aims to bring value by selecting, filtering and contextualizing existing content for easy consumption.  Curating does require research, evaluating and judgment to choose what’s more relevant but it does not require creativity and not the work of an artist.

AI, ChatGPT, and other “robots” do not create – they curate for our consumption.  Searching through all that has already been said and done and then serving it up to us without us really knowing what ingredients have gone into the dish.  It can be tasty, but it is not authentic.

And while there can be great value in the curation of information through the use of these tools, let’s not let our brains go to mush in the meantime. 

Next time you feel the need to “ask google” or run something by ChatGPT, why not ponder the situation and see what you can come up on your own first and keep your brain in shape.